Is human sentence parsing serial or parallel? Evidence from event-related brain potentials.

@article{Hopf2003IsHS,
  title={Is human sentence parsing serial or parallel? Evidence from event-related brain potentials.},
  author={Jens-Max Hopf and Markus Bader and Michael Meng and Josef Bayer},
  journal={Brain research. Cognitive brain research},
  year={2003},
  volume={15 2},
  pages={
          165-77
        }
}
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26 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
4
Background Citations
13
Methods Citations
3
Results Citations
2

26 Citations

Electrophysiological evidence for serial sentence processing: a comparison between non-preferred and ungrammatical continuations.
Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
TLDR
Empirical evidence bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought to be associated with processing syntactically ambiguous material is reviewed, arguing that this prediction is not confirmed by the data, and recent claims that the models in question do not actually make this prediction are discussed.
Repair, Revision, and Complexity in Syntactic Analysis: An Electrophysiological Differentiation
TLDR
The results are consistent with the idea that a positivity with a posterior distribution across the scalp (posterior P600) is an index of syntactic processing difficulty, including repair and revision, and that a frontally distributed positivity is related to ambiguity resolution and/ or to an increase in discourse level complexity.
Differential Electrophysiological Signatures of Semantic and Syntactic Scene Processing
TLDR
It is concluded that different neural populations are active during semantic and syntactic processing of scenes, and that syntactically impossible object placements are processed in a categorically different manner than are syntactic resolvable object misplacements.
Syntactic and semantic predictors of tense in Hindi: An ERP investigation
TLDR
Results suggest that the parser indeed tracks the cause of an error in addition to the content of errors, and the nature of the cue led to distinct patterns of ERPs in response to anomalous verbal morphology.
Differential ERP Signatures Elicited by Semantic and Syntactic Processing in Scenes
In sentence processing, semantic and syntactic violations elicit differential brain responses in ERP recordings: An N400 signals semantic violations, while a P600 marks inconsistent syntactic…
The Division of Labor Between Structure Building and Feature Checking During Sentence Comprehension
  • M. Bader
  • Linguistics
    Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing
  • 2019
TLDR
It is argued that the two-stage architecture of the Garden-Path Theory still provides a better account of the garden-path strength observed for object-before-subject sentences in German.
When verbs have bugs: lexical and syntactic processing costs of split particle verbs in sentence comprehension
TLDR
The results show that the integration of split particle verbs violating sentence structure or lexical constraints leads to both lexical and syntactic processing difficulty, which extends earlier comparable findings reporting only lexical access difficulties and suggests that the parse is not immediately abandoned upon encountering a nonexistent particle verb.
The Importance of Reading Naturally: Evidence From Combined Recordings of Eye Movements and Electric Brain Potentials.
TLDR
The results suggest that the sentence processing system engages in strategic choices: in response to words that don't match built-up expectations, it can either explore alternative interpretations or pursue a "good-enough" processing strategy that tolerates a deficient interpretation.
Multi-dimensional contributions to garden path strength: Dissociating phrase structure from case marking
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References

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The results of this study support a parser design according to which the so-called structural case (nominative or accusative) is assigned without any delay in the absence of morpho-lexical counterevidence, and argue that the enhancement of a negative ERP component with a ficlassicalfl N400 topography refiects the difficulty of reanalysis due to reaccessing morpho,lexical information that lies outside the domain of the parsing module.
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An all-visual, on-line, lexical priming technique was used to investigate whether the human sentence processor computes syntactic representations serially or in parallel. Structurally ambiguous…
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TLDR
Findings indicate that such biases exist and can influence the parser under certain conditions and that P600 amplitude is a function of the perceived syntactic well-formedness of the sentence.
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TLDR
Event-related potentials were used to study how parsing of German relative clauses is influenced by semantic information, and fast comprehenders showed larger N400 amplitudes for neutral than for semantically biased past participles in general and larger N 400s for the latter when there was a bias for an object relative reading as opposed to a subject relative reading.
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